A great arty video using Kinect and raytracing

Kinect Project /// I Dieci from Alkanoids on Vimeo.

It is using the opensource Kinect drivers I have been using, ni-mate (a Kinect to 3d rending engine) and the engine blender.

More information including a "making of" onbehance.com

Too bad there is not much information online about how they build this... Cool technology though, lame dancing :-)

I am, not the biggest fan of "Native Apps", e.g. applications that one has to install on you phone or tablet that are nothing more than a browser reading an RSS feed and displaying the results in a fancy way. Silos.

And ... without letting the user know, send lots of data of the tablet (location, contacts etc) to the mothership. Think about it, would you install "cnn.exe" on your windows host just to access one site? Would you download "microsoft.dmg" to see the website from the other side? Hell no, native apps must die, silos will fall down. I have been ranting about this for a long time, 2008, again and recent in my famous there is an app for that, it is called a browser post.

With progresive design being the standard and with modern mobile browsers honering the tags like VIDEO, a "HTML-Apps" will crush native apps. Not everybody shares that vision, but in broader sense it is clear that webapps will dominate above native apps in the mobile space; they are easy central to update and by definition cross platform.

As stated before, the browser is the OS.

If this is true, there is no reason to stop at a specific devices like a mobile. And indeed, Google docs replaced the office suite and as can be sen below, with pure HTML you can even do photobooth alike effects.

And now garageband is having a hard time with a browser based -less UI more interaction with friend- tool called jamwithchrome.
.

One day, the browser will be the OS and we will all have big fat thin clients again with a mixture of local data and apps and remote data and apps. Al I wish for is that -despite the fact that I wish every company as much sicess as they can get- Google will not be the new Microsoft and Chrome not the new IE.

I used the kinect to scan my head and made some real time tracking and rendering as can be seen in the videos below.

setting up Kinect:

3D scan of my head:

Tracking / rendering using my head:

I like this work, using the xbox kinect to navigate in a 3d environment:

In this video Carl demonstrates how we are using the Xbox Kinect to navigate around the 3D CAVE at CASALA.

However, THIS is even cooler:

For our archeology department at the university of Groningen, we made this 3D stereo reconstruction of an excavation in Crustumerium, an Iron Age settlement in Italy (800-450 BC).

It is so cool to see that Universities and artist are using the cheap Kinect to make interaction between the Real and the Virtual world possible. BTW: Groningen FTW! :-)